Contaminated Site Clean-Up Information (CLU-IN): Internet Seminar Video Archives

The NIEHS Superfund Research Program (SRP) is hosting a Risk e-Learning webinar series focused on understanding the health effects of exposures when there is a lag between exposure and the onset of the disease. The first session will introduce exposures and latent disease risk, including information about windows of susceptibility, later-life health outcomes, and will set the stage for the other sessions. SRP Director William Suk, Ph.D., M.P.H., will provide an overview of the series and briefly discuss the importance of linking exposures to diseases with long latency periods. Rebecca Fry, Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill SRP Center, will provide an overview of arsenic and its latent life health impacts. Inorganic arsenic continues to poison the drinking water of millions of individuals around the globe. Exposure to arsenic early in life is associated with later life health effects in both human populations and rodent models. Increasing evidence suggests that these later life health effects may be tied to changes to the epigenome. Heather Stapleton, Ph.D., of the Duke University SRP Center, and Seth Kullman, Ph.D., a co-investigator on Stapleton's Duke SRP project as well as a North Carolina State University SRP Center researcher, will discuss how flame retardants and environmentally relevant mixtures induce adipogenesis, and the long-term impacts on metabolic disorders. People are chronically exposed to mixtures of contaminants in the indoor environment, and many of these contaminants are known to impact endocrine function. Their research groups have been exploring the mechanisms by which flame retardants and mixtures containing flame retardants isolated from house dust effect adipogenesis and osteogenesis. They seek to understand whether these compounds and mixtures of these compounds can potentially impact human health outcomes. This talk will discuss research on the adipogenic and osteogenic activity from commercial mixtures such as Firemaster 550, individual chemicals, and house dust extracts, and their associations with select phenotypic and metabolic endpoints measured in a small fish models of human disease, cell cultures, and human cohorts. Brian Berridge, D.V.M., Ph.D., scientific director of the NIEHS Division of the National Toxicology Program (NTP), will discuss the assessment of latent hazards at NTP. It is generally accepted that early life and chronic low-level exposures to some environmental agents can cause or contribute to later life health effects. Modeling these contributions is challenging and the focus of a number of traditional approaches to environmental toxicology testing. The DNTP is actively building capabilities to expand our ability to understand the long-term health effects of environmental exposures. To view this archive online or download the slides associated with this seminar, please visit http://www.clu-in.org/conf/tio/SRPExposures1_051120/